Current holders of the ARPG crown congratulate Path of Exile 2 devs on release as Diablo 4 leads admit they're jumping in themselves

Despite some stiff competition from a few other major titles, the early access release of Path of Exile 2 has blown fans away and racked up hundreds of thousands of players on Steam, including a few developers from their ARPG brethren over at Blizzard.

Just before its massively successful launch, Diablo 4 general manager Rod Fergusson took to Twitter to congratulate PoE 2 developer Grinding Gear Games on the launch, expressing how excited he was to jump in himself. "Before the craziness of launch day tomorrow, I just wanted to say 'Congratulations!' to GGG for their Early Access release of Path of Exile 2! My pre-download is finished and I'm looking forward to playing over the holidays." he tweeted.

Craziness was certainly the right word for PoE 2's launch, as more than a million players attempted to access the servers leading to some players having to queue for several hours to get in—a level of popularity that the developers themselves had certainly not been expecting. Indeed, several days on from its launch, PoE 2 is currently sitting comfortably as the third most popular game on Steam according to SteamDB, only behind the ever-present Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2.

It's a tremendous achievement for GGG with the sequel already achieving double the peak player count of the original game, and is especially impressive when one considers that players currently have to pay to play the game in its current state - just imagine how high those numbers would be if it was free to play off the bat.

Fergusson rounded off his message to the developers by adding a sentiment that will certainly be echoed around the ARPG playerbase for the next few weeks: "Now to figure out what class to play…". You and us both, Rod.

If you're not ready to jump into Path of Exile 2 yet, why not check out some of the best RPG games available right now?